Advertising in the pits

There is an ad running during the NCAA basketball playoffs that’s so creepy and surreal that I decided to take some screen shots of it, as a kind of public service to the company spending money on it.

The scene is a guy’s hairy armpit. (Do they have armpit models? Guess so.) As if this weren’t icky enough, all of a sudden a rectangle of flesh drops down, opening a grave, right there, in his sparse forest of hair. It’s like watching that eyeball get sliced in Un chien andalou. Creepy as shit. And you wonder, where did the missing block of pit go? Is it down by the rib cage somewhere? Packed around his rotator cuff? Or is he hollow? And why no blood?

Then this white triangular thing rises out of the same hole.

You wonder, what the fuck is that? before seeing that Oh, okay, it’s a Matterhorn. But it’s not like the real thing. It’s more like a toy Matterhorn, with a little Swiss Chalet at its base, flanked by a few trees, looking like a snow-globe scene, without the globe and the snow.

By the time it’s over you’ve witnessed two awful things you don’t want happening to your body: Having your armpit turned into a deep hole — and then having it replaced by a piece of broken kitsch. It’s so disturbing that you don’t even notice, much less remember, the name of the advertiser.